Reviews 2008

Adventures into Otherness

Maria Lassén-Seger’s Adventures into Otherness is a worthwhile text
as interesting as it is problematic. I will save the problems for the end of this
review, for its successes ultimately outweigh its faults. Simply put, the book
explores the trope of metamorphosis in late twentieth-century children’s and
adolescent literature through the close-reading of a variety of texts from a
primarily structuralist methodology. Lassén-Seger is interested in whether the
physical transformations featured in her selected texts empower or disempower
the transformed children and young adults. This project is indebted to Roberta
Seelinger Trites’s Disturbing the Universe, particularly Trites’s
formulation of “empowerment.” Lassén-Seger’s key questions, then, are

[1] [D]oes the physical change entrap, silence or repress child characters in
a manner that undercuts their individual agency and forces them into submission
or regression? Or [2] does the experience of otherness increase their agency and
self-awareness in a manner that enhances the equality of children and adults, or
subverts adult authority? (3)

She addresses these dual concerns by grouping the texts in three major
categories: wild and uncivilized child metamorphs; innocent, playful, and rebellious
child metamorphs; victimised and lost child metamorphs. Threading through these
discussions is her engagement with current debates on “how the child in fiction
for children is constructed as ‘the Other’—potentially an Other that is colonized
by adults” (10). Most of us will be familiar with these debates: Perry Nodelman’s
“The Precarious Life of Children’s Literature Criticism” (2007) describes these
and related fault-lines with great skill. Throughout her book, Lassén-Seger
navigates these troubled waters expertly, carefully articulating the diverse
opinions of Joe Zoronado, Nodelman, Karin Lesik-Oberstein, David Rudd, Roderick
McGillis, Trites, and others, all the while charting the sensible, productive
course from which her work emerges. Nevertheless, her reiteration of these debates
does suggest the dreaded “literature review” necessary in all doctoral dissertations.
It proves the neophytes’ ethos, shows that they have done the research
and deserve a place on the playing field. It does not necessarily make for
gripping reading, especially if you are familiar with the literature yourself.

One of the real delights afforded by Adventures into Otherness is its
wide-ranging selection of texts. Grouping the texts thematically provides the reader
with a sense of coherence, even as we romp through time and space, encountering
the very familiar, like C.S. Lewis’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (1952),
alongside the relatively unfamiliar, like Janet Anderson’s Going Through the Gate
(1997). As a fan of Anthony Browne, I was pleased to read Lassén-Seger’s analysis
of his The Tunnel (1989), which is still not readily available in the
U.S. For the U.S. scholar, the book serves as a window into another world of
children’s texts that simply aren’t talked about in the Americas (well, maybe
in Canada). Helen Recorvits and Gabi Swiatkowska, Henrik Drescher, Blair Drawson,
Melvin Burgess and Ruth Brown, and Gary Crew and Steven Woolman are just some of
the under-discussed writers and artists whose work Lassén-Seger explores. Placing
these artists beside better known figures like T.H. White, Maurice Sendak,
William Steig, Diana Wynne Jones, and Quentin Blake broadens and complicates the
textual landscape considerably, which is no mean accomplishment.

Despite the thematic arrangement of her chapters, Lassén-Seger largely avoids
totalizing, reductive readings of her selected texts. She notes, for instance,
that she initially thought that the texts about “wild and uncivilized child
metamorphs” would be “permeated by an adult desire to guide—even force—the child
into quashing his/her inappropriate desires and conform to prescribed expectations
of gender and social conduct.” However, her analyses show that “many stories were
not in fact so easily reducible to lessons in growing up” (96). Furthermore, she
acknowledges that children may use even the overtly “disempowering metamorphoses”
found in texts like The Tunnel in surprising and subversive ways. That is,
we should not assume that simply “reading about disempowering metamorphoses of
fictive children is straightforwardly equally disempowering and harmful to the
child reader,” as children approach texts in a variety of ways (97).

In a useful appendix, Lassén-Seger places all the primary texts in chronological
order. However, one would like a bit more history in this book. Perhaps because
of her narratological commitments, Lassén-Seger attends to the books’ structural
elements, but only rarely their social and historical aspects. Aside from contemporary
book reviews, readers will find little historical context informing her analysis.

The acknowledgements make clear that Adventures into Otherness began
as a dissertation. And it is a fine one. Any dissertation advisor would be proud
to sign off on this impressive study: its subject is novel and its approach is
rigorous. However, it is not yet a book. It looks like a book—almost. The cover
is printed badly, the ink grew tacky as I read it, and the pages are poorly bound.
These pages were so crammed with text that there was no room for annotation.

Adventures into Otherness also reads like a dissertation, containing
that tentative, excruciating rigor dissertation committees insist upon, but which
publishers generally edit out. The introduction is largely spent explaining what
the book will not cover and why, just as each chapter ends with a summary,
reasserting its main claims. The language is also marked with what is sometimes
called “dissertationese,” a highly wrought prose-style that often gets in the
way of clearly expressing complex ideas. None of this, I stress, is the author’s
fault. The fault lies with Åbo Akademi Press, who should have guided this text
more carefully in its metamorphosis from dissertation to book. Indeed, I understand
that in Scandinavian countries, dissertations are usually published immediately
after completion, and that they are not considered complete until they are published.
This procedure is problematic, as it means that the books then miss the chance
to be refashioned into something more than a dissertation, as they are not re-edited
and re-published afterwards. Streamlined and well-published, Adventures into
Otherness would have been a notable addition to the discourse on children’s
literature. I regret that Lassén-Seger’s worthwhile project had to end in the
form it did. It deserves better.